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The example I referenced, at the conference I organised, was tame relative to Matt's talk too.

I'm not sure how to read your response. If you're alerting me to what happened this past week at the flashbelt conference; thank you. It's a shame this kind of thing could happen in such close time proximity. I was reading about it earlier today, and have yet to see if Hoss Gifford is going to apologise or if he'll leave his twitter comment as good enough. Fortunately I haven't (yet) seen people suggesting th

By the way, I agree entirely. Although I did not see it, Hoss' talk is by far the most offensive and juvenile I've heard of (and well beyond what I would like to think I'd stay in a room to watch). I think it'd be difficult to make a more misogynistic-sounding, yet still sort of technical talk; but I won't say that it'd be impossible lest someone take it as a challenge.

I'm planning to role-play the situation a few times so that should I ever been in such a situation, I won't sit back in horror to watch the train-wreck but will feel some confidence in objecting loudly and asking that the speaker end their presentation; or at the very least objecting loudly and leaving.

I think the role-playing is necessary, as this doesn't seem to be an action most people are comfortable taking. Again and again, this kind of thing happens and the programme committee just sits by and watches it go wrong without getting up and booting the speaker off stage. I was guilty of it, Matt's room coordinator was guilty of it and Dave (the flashbelt organiser) appears to have been guilty of it too. I only know of one talk along these lines that was interrupted by the organiser, and that was at the Sydney Linux Users' Group last year.

Most of us are pretty good at not interrupting even when we feel that the material ought to be interrupted. I'm thinking of writing a brief training course on this topic to give something programme committees can practice with.